Before leading the Android division, Sameer Samat made a bold move early in his career that would end up shaping his professional journey: cold-emailing Google, rebranded as Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) in 2015, co-founder Sergey Brin at 3 am.
What Happened: Back in 1999, Samat was in his early 20s, running a machine learning startup called Mohomine during the dot-com boom.
When his co-founders considered leaving to attend grad school, he struggled with how to keep the company going. In search of advice, Samat reached out to Brin, having read his academic papers and admired Google's mission.
"This is 1999, 3 a.m. email," Samat recalled in an interview with Business Insider, saying he asked Brin, "What would you do in this situation? I'm sure you wrestled with this grad school decision."
To Samat's surprise, Brin replied within a minute and invited him to visit Google's office. What started as a conversation quickly turned into an on-the-spot job interview. He "paraded one engineering person after another into the room," Samat said.
Though Brin offered him a job, Samat declined, choosing to stay loyal to his startup. Brin respected the decision and even introduced him to investors, some of whom helped fund Mohomine.
“He didn’t have to do any of that,” Samat stated, adding, “And so I try to pay that forward, too, when people call me up with something similar.”
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Samat's company was later acquired by Kofax (now Tungsten Automation), giving Samat valuable startup experience.
He eventually joined Google in 2008 after being persuaded by Marissa Mayer and interviewing with Sundar Pichai, who would later become CEO. He left in 2015, only to return when Pichai personally asked him to help lead Android and Google Play, the report added.
Why It's Important: In a separate interview with TechRadar last week, Samat confirmed that the company plans to merge its Android mobile operating system with ChromeOS, which currently powers Chromebooks.
They're aiming for a single unified platform, hinting at evolving how laptops fit into Google's ecosystem. This statement is the clearest official sign yet of a move that has been speculated about for months.
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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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